


in the quiet, we are fine

by lupinely



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: (also ed is agender), M/M, here it is. my cowboy bebop magnum opus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-04 08:07:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10986903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: Spike and Jet never put a name to what they are doing together, and they both prefer it that way. They’re two people on a spaceship trying to make a living. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.Then the dog shows up. Then Faye. Then Ed.





	in the quiet, we are fine

 

  

 

 _You can’t cross the same river twice._  
“Rain in Soho,” by the Mountain Goats.

 

  

 

1.  
Spike reclines on the couch, bandages wrapped around his torso, his abdomen, his left shoulder, his knees. It is a familiar sight: one that, in its own strange way, comforts Jet because at least it makes sense, at least it means that Spike is right here, right now, and nowhere else.

Spike tilts his head towards Jet. It is about all the movement that he can manage at the moment. “Can I have a smoke?”

Jet lights a cigarette and holds it to Spike’s mouth for him. Spike closes his eyes, holds his breath, and smiles. Jet counts nearly to thirty before Spike finally coughs, laughs, and smoke trails out between his teeth.

“Hey,” Spike says, low and raspy. Like there is something hilarious he just thought of but he doesn’t know how to share it. “Remember how we met?”

Jet takes a drag of the cigarette and nods before holding it back to Spike’s lips.

“What if you’d gone to Alba City instead?” Spike is smiling still, like he has never thought of anything so funny. “What if you had never been on Mars at all?” A husky laugh. “That’s wild, man.”

Yeah, is all Jet can think. What if.

 

 

 

It happened like this.

Jet stops at a port on Mars to refuel and recharge—not just the _Bebop_ but himself, too. It has been a long time since his last collected bounty, and he is starting to wonder if another career change is in order. Though he has no idea where he would even go from here: an ex-cop turned bounty hunter always felt like it was going to be the end of the line for him. A star system that is slowly crumbling apart at the edges (if you have the wits to see it) doesn’t really provide a lot of opportunities for remaking yourself: for change, as it were. For transformation.

When Jet gets back to the ship port after spending the day in Tharsis scrounging for what supplies he can afford, there is a man sitting against the port authority building, one thumb held out in a petulant hitchhiker gesture, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth and an expression of deep, unspeakable exhaustion on his face. Only a handful of ships are docked in the shipyard including the _Bebop_ , and the walkways are empty at the moment except for Jet and this man whom Jet would have ignored had it not been for that expression.

(Later, Jet will think that he saw more of Spike that day than he ever will in all the days that come after. There had been something, a look in Spike’s eyes, that Spike had been unable to hide then but that he would learn to hide later: an all-consuming sort of emptiness, something not quite like grief but not like resignation, either; a look that says _it hurts and that’s all there is_ so clearly that it will amaze Jet, later, to realize that it had ever been there at all. This from the man who never says anything clearly. This from the man who holds a finger up between his eyes and sees the world split around it, a man so lost in that dichotomy that he never sees anything at all.)

Jet stops in front of the man, who looks up at him, squinting in the thin sunlight through the dusky orange-brown sky. “Where you headed?” Jet asks.

The man looks past Jet towards the Tharsis skyline for a long moment. If he sees something there, Jet does not know what it is. “Anywhere,” he says after a moment, and lifts his dying cigarette to his lips.

“You got money for passage?”

The man flicks the butt of his cigarette away. “No.”

Jet should turn and walk away. That much he knows. But—damn it, what’s the point? “You any good at bounty hunting?”

The man looks up at him thoughtfully. “You a cowboy?” he asks, and seems to think on it for a bit. “I bet I could do that.”

“Well, you help me catch a bounty, we’ll split it even and you can stay on my ship as long as you like. Sound fair?”

“Sounds fair.” The man gets to his feet and brushes himself off. There are scabs—fresh and new—on the back of his knuckles, and a faded black eye blooming across his cheekbone. He holds out his hand for Jet to shake. “Spike.”

“Jet.”

“Which ship is yours?”

Jet gestures at the _Bebop_.

“Bit of a rust bucket, isn’t she?”

“First rule of my ship,” Jet says, leading the way over to it: “keep your damn mouth shut about my ship.”

Spike laughs. And that’s that.

 

 

 

Spike spends probably about fifty percent of his first few weeks aboard the _Bebop_ asleep, which leads Jet to make some adjustments to his own lifestyle, mostly in that he has to try hard not to wake Spike accidentally. It would be one thing if Spike slept in the quarters that Jet has so thoughtfully provided for him, but as far as Jet can tell Spike doesn’t even spend any of his time in his room. Instead he sleeps on the couch in what Jet has affectionately dubbed the living room, or in the pilot’s chair in the cockpit, or literally on the floor, one time, in the hallway to the cargo bay. Jet wants to give him a hard time about it and finds that he can’t: that unspoken vulnerability he saw in Spike on Mars seems to resurface whenever Jet encounters Spike asleep, sprawled every which way, snoring loudly, about as unconscious as someone can be without actually being sedated. Jet can’t help but wonder what the hell happened to this kid that left him in such a state, that has him needing weeks upon weeks of sleep in order to recover and return to something approaching functionality.

So Jet lets him sleep. It’s not like there are any good bounties out there at the moment anyway. And when one does turn up, Spike slouches over Jet’s shoulder, reads the bounty listing, and says, “Huh. Simple enough,” and they go out and actually catch the man.

“This isn’t so hard,” Spike says after they collect their money. “Didn’t you say this was gonna be harder?”

Jet hands Spike his share. “Don’t get cocky,” he tells him, but that’s like telling the sun not to shine. “Every beginner gets lucky at first.”

Spike snorts. “Yeah, sure,” he says, and goes off to spend his money on cigarettes and booze.

They just sorta stick together after that. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

 

 

* * *

 

 

2.  
“Ed likes this show,” Ed says, lounging with their head hanging off the edge of the couch, upside down, as they watch the bright colors and images on the small screen on the table in front of them. Spike, reclining on the couch lengthways, still heavily bandaged and not quite able to move around by himself yet, tosses a piece of popcorn up in the air. Ed catches it in their mouth and laughs.

“Me too, kid,” Spike says. The show is a stupid meaningless comedy of some sort. Spike isn’t even really sure what is happening as he watches it, and Ed kicks their feet over the back of the couch and says something to which Spike only half-pays attention. Spike shoves a handful of popcorn into his mouth and throws some more up in the air for Ed. Whatever pieces Ed misses fall to the floor, where Ein immediately snaps them up.

“You’re making a mess,” someone says from behind them, with great disdain.

“Faye-Faye!”

“Stuff it, kid,” Faye says. Ed kicks their feet again and waves their hands at her.

“No we’re not,” Spike says, and points at Ein eating popcorn from the floor. “Look. The dumb mutt has got us covered. No mess. No lectures from Jet about respecting shared communal spaces or whatever bullshit.”

Faye snorts, then sits on the edge of the couch and snags the popcorn from Spike’s hands. “What’s on?”

“Nothing,” Spike says. “There’s no good channels out here past Europa. Give me that back.”

Faye holds it out of his reach. “Should invalids really be eating popcorn? Is that the healthy diet of someone recovering from multiple life-threatening injuries? I think I’d better take this for your own good.”

“Ed wants some!”

“And Ed can have some,” Faye says, handing Ed some popcorn, “because Ed is responsible and doesn’t run off getting themself nearly killed every other week, unlike other people aboard this ship.”

“Yay!”

“Cut it out,” Spike says. Faye’s insufferable moods have only increased in the past couple of weeks, for reasons that Spike cannot discern, being unable, as always, to read any of her moods any better than he can read his own. “I’m sick so I can eat whatever I want.”

“Yeah, you’re sick,” Faye says. She munches on the popcorn and then shows Spike the empty bowl with only unpopped kernels left. “Sick in the head.”

“Goddamnit, Faye. I paid for that popcorn.”

“Yeah, goddamnit, Faye-Faye!”

Faye levels a critical eye at Spike. “Look what you’re teaching the kid.”

“You’re the one who taught them the f-bomb,” Spike says. “For fuck’s sake.”

Faye throws the kernels in his face and leaves. Ed laughs and kicks their feet and helps Spike, eventually, get the kernels out of his hair, since he is currently working with only one free arm and his chest hurts to breathe if he starts to laugh too hard.

Faye pokes her head back into the living room. “Was Vicious your ex?”

Spike chokes. “What?”

“Just trying to figure it all out,” Faye says, smiling sweetly, and Spike thinks, _fuck, you’re not the only one._

 

 

 

The thing is—look, okay, the thing is that it’s _complicated_. That’s all. Like most things, it doesn’t make sense, and for all that Spike has tried to make sense out of (God, has he fucking tried), it has proven impossible. Did he fall in love with Julia or Vicious? When he stood in that graveyard in the rain waiting for her, had he brought a gun to shoot _her_ with on Vicious’ orders, or had she?

Memory is like a kaleidoscope, like looking at Phobos while standing on Deimos and holding up your thumb to cover the other tiny moon in its entirety but it’s still there. Close one eye and it’s still there. Parallax, they call that, or don’t they?

Spike remembers the weight of a gun but not whether he ever pulled the trigger. He remembers sighting down his opponent, one eye—his left eye—squeezed shut, his right eye staring into the past, into a dream, and seeing not truth but mimicry. Who had looked back at him then? He doesn’t remember.

The thing is that only Faye Valentine would look at him and ask such a stupid question, such a bitter and important question, and smile while doing it, all while knowing better than anyone else that there is no way of acquiring meaning out of the past when the past lacks context. Spike remembers looking up out of the crumbling remains of the tallest tower in Tharsis, up at the stars, sharper and brighter than anything that can be seen from Earth thanks to Mars’ thin atmosphere, the utter lack of pollution on a planet with barely enough gravity to hold you down when you stand on its surface. It always felt like if you could just jump high enough, from the tip of this tower, that you would keep falling upwards forever, until you were close enough to touch those stars.

When Vicious almost killed Spike and Julia nursed Spike back to health, was there something else to it? He remembers a boot pressed to the crotch of his pants, bearing down. He remembers Vicious telling him, _you betrayed me first:_ that if there was blame to bear, guilt to shoulder, then it belonged to Spike alone.

What if he was right?

 

 

 

Blood is dripping from Spike’s nose, but it is more of a nuisance than anything else. Luckily he doesn’t think it’s broken—actually, it is amazing that after all these years he still hasn’t broken his nose. Are there odds on that?—but he can taste copper in the back of his throat. Blood keeps spattering down the front of his shirt (he has removed his jacket and is carrying it carefully folded over his arm), and for some reason this pisses him off. He wipes his face with the back of his hand and it comes away scarlet, comes away shining slick in the dim light.

Spike stomps onto the _Bebop_ and hunts around for some tissues, doesn’t find any, and settles for a wad of toilet paper from the bathroom. He sits in the living room without turning on any of the lights and pinches his nose and holds the toilet paper against it to soak up the blood that just won’t stop flowing. Maybe his brains will flow out with the rest of it and he can finally stop fucking thinking, stop hurting, stop—

A light flicks on. It’s late, or it is late in the time zone where they are currently parked on Earth, but when you spend most of your time in space, hopping from planet to moon to asteroid to planet, all with different day lengths and time zones and nights and mornings, ‘late’ becomes a concept that starts to lose all meaning. Along with everything else.

The tread of Jet’s feet is surprisingly light for such a big man. He sits, not on the couch opposite Spike, but on the table in front of him, crowding easily into Spike’s space even though Spike is putting off his best don’t-fuck-with-me vibe. Jet puts his hands on Spike’s knees, eases them apart so that he fits between them, and then he is right in front of Spike and there is no looking away from him, because it is like Jet takes up the whole goddamn room just by breathing, just by regarding him.

“What’d you do?” Jet asks, looking at the bloody wad of toilet paper.

“Dunno,” Spike says. “There was like, this bar fight or something.”

“And you just jumped into it?”

Spike shrugs. “Why not? It looked like fun.”

Jet sighs and takes Spike’s chin gently in his hands, tilting Spike’s face so that it better catches the light. He puts his thumbs on either side of Spike’s swollen nose, gently feeling to see if there are any breaks. He is very close, and Spike’s head is throbbing, the light suddenly too bright, too blinding, and all he wants at this moment is to pull Jet in by his hips and get him between Spike’s legs properly, where Jet belongs. Spike snorts at that, then winces, because that makes his face hurt even more.

Jet shakes his head and pulls away a little bit, though he leaves one hand, his right hand, resting against the side of Spike’s face. “Did you win?”

“What?”

“The bar fight.”

“’Win’ is such a reductive concept,” Spike says. “I like to think I did something better than win.”

“Which is?”

“Make a point,” Spike says. He pulls away the bloody toilet paper from his nose and gingerly puts his tongue against his upper lip. His nose has stopped bleeding at least. And he gets a nice thrill of satisfaction at the way Jet’s gaze tracks the movement of his tongue. “That fighting in a bar over a chick is stupid, because she’s just going to get bored halfway through and leave anyway.”

“How wise of you,” Jet says. His hand has slid from Spike’s cheekbone to the nape of his neck, and he is toying with Spike’s hair, idly.

“I thought so.”

They sit there in silence for a moment, the sound of the fan whirring above them the only noise in the otherwise utterly quiet ship. Spike catches his bottom lip between his teeth, just to see if Jet will watch him do that too. He does. Goddamn, but sometimes it feels like all Jet has to do is _look_ at Spike to get him turned on, whereas Spike has to try and do all these things to get Jet’s attention. Really unfair. Spike is going to figure that out if it’s the last thing he does.

“So,” Spike says, “wanna fuck?”

Jet rolls his eyes. “You get your face busted up in a random bar fight, then you come back and want to have sex?”

“I don’t need my face to fuck,” Spike says. He considers. “Not all the time.”

Jet laughs, which Spike likes the sound of. He likes it when Jet laughs. “Maybe not,” Jet says. His fingers are still playing with the hair at the back of Spike’s neck, real gentle, and it makes Spike shiver. Jet doesn’t say anything for a long time, and then when he does he sounds sad rather than turned on, which is what Spike had been going for. “I don’t understand you, Spike.”

Jet’s face is serious, his gaze somber, and Spike decides he really doesn’t like it. He tosses the bloody toilet paper aside and finally puts his hands on Jet’s hips like he has wanted to this whole time and pulls Jet in close. “I’ll tell you a secret,” Spike says, flicking his gaze from Jet’s eyes to his mouth and back again; “I don’t, either.”

 

 

* * *

 

   

3.  
“Settle a bet for me,” Faye says over dinner one night. “Which one of you kissed the other first?”

“I did,” Spike says immediately, which is a blatant lie, and Jet tells everyone so.

“You can swear from here to judgment day that you made the first move, but we both know it was me,” Jet says (a little smugly). “I had to do all the hard work at seducing you.”

“Oh, please,” Faye says. “Spike’s easy.”

Spike nods vigorously. “Yeah, Jet. I’m easy.”

“Did I say hard work?” Jet asks. Spike sticks his tongue out at him. “Either way, it was me and you know it.”

“Whatever,” Spike says. “Memory will lie to you.”

It is one of those things that Spike always says and that always makes Jet stop in his tracks when he hears it, one of those things that Spike has never explained and never will. Jet thinks about pushing his foot behind Spike’s calf beneath the table, a comforting sort of touch that might make Spike smile, or scowl—better either way than the frightening apathy that always threatens Spike at the edges—but the moment has already passed, and Spike is glaring at Faye, narrowed-eyed.

“Who did you make that bet with?” Spike glances at Ed, but Ed isn’t paying attention to any of them, currently locked in the middle of a digital chess game and humming to themself.

“Ein,” Faye says, and tosses the dog a piece of food from her plate. Ein catches it and barks.

Spike is incredulous. “The mutt won?”

“Yeah,” Faye says. “I had faith in you, Spike. Dunno why I bothered.”

 

 

 

Two things: it _was_ Jet who kissed Spike first. And while it wasn’t hard work, it was—well, weird is maybe the word for it. Uncomfortable. A sort of absurdity that Jet still cannot explain.

Jet is not immune to charm, though he tries to be. And Spike can be very charming when he’s not being a shit. That is one of the first things that Jet learns about him during those first few months that Spike is aboard the _Bebop_. What makes Jet notice it is that Spike rarely, if ever, tries to charm _him_ —and Jet can’t figure out why. And if you aren’t direct with Spike you will never get any answers, so Jet decides one day to just bite the bullet, so to speak, and see what the hell is up with his new shipmate that has got him acting so weird around Jet about ninety percent of the time.

It is the way Spike’s gaze follows Jet when Jet isn’t looking; the way Spike tilts his head at him sometimes before blowing out a soft cloud of smoke at Jet’s face. It is the way that Spike is all too willing to take up room on Jet’s ship and in Jet’s space and in Jet’s life while saying as little as possible about himself, so that Jet often feels like he is living with a ghost rather than a person. An annoying ghost, who steals Jet’s food and his smokes and spends his time finding new and more horrifying ways to get himself and the Swordfish beat up to hell and back.

“Tell me,” Jet says to Spike one night while they are on the _Bebop’s_ main deck, doing maintenance on their zipcrafts, “what is it exactly that you don’t like about me?”

Spike rubs his forehead with the back of his hand and glances at Jet. “What?”

“You don’t have to keep hiding it. We work together well enough as bounty hunters, but the rest of the time you hardly even seem to want to be around me. What is it? If it’s something I can fix, I will, and if it isn’t I’d still rather know about it, just to have the air cleared between us.”

Spike squints at the horizon, where the sun is setting and the sky has turned a mellow orange. There are rock showers forecast to start that night, but by then the _Bebop_ will be long gone, flying through astral gates to its new destination. “Why wouldn’t I like you? I mean, I guess you’re kind of a shitty cook, and a bit bossy, but—”

“Oh, please,” Jet says, “don’t hold back.”

Spike gives him a pointed look. “You’re the one who asked. I don’t know what you mean by it. I don’t _not_ like you.”

Jet has to resist the urge to roll his eyes, which he knows from experience tends to piss Spike off. “You certainly don’t treat me the way you treat other people. It just seemed to me that was because you didn’t like me.”

Spike looks utterly perplexed. “How do I treat other people?”

“You—” Jet waves his prosthetic arm around a little bit, scrambling to figure out how to explain this without making it sound as if he spends the majority of his free time lately watching Spike and wondering about him. “Surely you know how you are. You’re charming with them.”

“You want me to be charming with you?”

“I just want to know what the deal is,” Jet says, getting a little annoyed himself now. “That’s all. I’ll drop it if you want me to.”

They continue working on their zipcrafts together in silence. Jet figures that the matter is dropped and that he won’t get a straight answer out of Spike now even if he tried. Damn infuriating, this one. Made more infuriating by the fact that he is gorgeous and clearly knows it, yet he won’t say anything to Jet or do anything with him that goes beyond the realm of strictly professional acquaintance.

Eventually Jet gets up to retrieve a tool from inside the cargo bay. He unzips the top of his jumpsuit as he does and ties the arms around his waist; it’s hot out, despite the fast-approaching dusk, and it has begun to get to him. When he turns around to return to the deck, he is surprised to find that Spike has followed him.

“Need something?” Jet indicates the array of various tools on the wall behind him.

Spike glances at them and then shakes his head. “I like you,” he says finally, and it seems to take an incredible amount of effort for him to even say it. “I don’t—really know what I’ve done to give off the impression otherwise, which I’m sorry about, and—” His gaze shifts around again, uneasily, and his tongue wets the corner of his mouth “—that’s all, I guess.”

Definitely infuriating. “Okay,” Jet says. “Thanks.”

When Spike doesn’t say anything else, Jet tries to move past him to return to the Hammerhead, but Spike stops him. “Why?” he asks. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t know,” Jet says. “I guess I just tend to like to know whether or not the person I’m working with hates my guts or not.”

Spike looks flustered, a little desperate. “I don’t.”

“So you’ve said.”

Spike’s hands are lingering on Jet’s shoulders, one of them plucking uselessly at the fraying threads of one of Jet’s sleeves, and Jet wonders what the hell is wrong with this kid, that he can want something so desperately and not even know that he wants it, that he can understand—or think he understands—so much about the world but not be able to understand himself.

“Are you all right?” Jet asks gently. They have never talked about what Spike was running from in Tharsis, and Jet suspects that they never really will, but it is clear that whatever happened has done a real number on Spike. If Jet enjoys giving Spike a hard time every once in a while, well—he knows when not to overdo it.

Spike seems to realize what his hands are doing, and he lowers them. “Yeah,” he says.

Just go for it, something in the back of Jet’s mind tells him. Jet can see in Spike’s eyes exactly what Spike wants right now. This will be something that he becomes quite adept at, with time—the only one who ever is. He sets aside the wrench and puts both of his hands on Spike’s hips.

Spike looks down at that, as if not quite sure what is happening. “You know,” he says after a moment. “You’re quite a big man.”

Jet almost wants to laugh, but he doesn’t. Instead he says, absurdly (because what do you even say to something like that?), “Yeah, well. I work out.”

Spike laughs a bit. “So do I,” he says, “but I don’t look like that.”

His tongue comes out to wet the corner of his mouth again. Got you, Jet thinks.

“You see what I mean?” Jet asks. “You can’t even flirt with me the way you flirt with other people.” Spike’s eyes widen, and he opens his mouth to protest, but before he can say anything Jet has leaned in and kissed him. Not an intense kiss, not a heated kiss, just a gentle press of Jet’s mouth against Spike’s. And then Jet picks up his wrench and goes back to the main deck where the Hammerhead is waiting for him.

Spike doesn’t join him there until a few minutes later. He isn’t blushing, but he looks as if he has been recently. Jet hides a smile.

“You’re an asshole,” Spike says.

“So are you.”

“Did you do all this as some sort of fucked up scheme to get me to admit that I’m into you?”

“You’re into me?”

Spike looks Jet up and down. He seems to be recovering from his embarrassment from earlier, because there is no doubt in his gaze anymore, just heat, and intensity of a kind that Jet recognizes but never thought would be directed his way. “Yeah.”

“It wasn’t a scheme. I genuinely thought you didn’t like me,” Jet says. “Although I will say I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.”

The grin Spike flashes him is bright, familiar, and pure Spike. “Oh, yeah?” he says. “Have you been perving on me?”

Jet’s face heats a little just from the lewdness of Spike’s expression more than anything else, and says, “Says the man who just informed me how big I am.”

Spike splutters a little, and tries to hide his renewed embarrassment by searching in his pockets for a cigarette. He turns up empty. “You infuriate me,” he says to Jet at last. “I don’t understand it. I don’t....” He waves a hand. “People don’t get under my skin.”

“But I have?”

“Yeah,” Spike says. The look he gives Jet is a little helpless, a little uncertain. “You have.”

Jet decides to throw him a lifeline, help him out a little. It’s not every day that the beautiful guy who has hitchhiked a ride on your spaceship tells you that he is flustered by you and doesn’t know why. “I can think of other ways that I’d rather be under you.”

Spike’s smile is slow, and a little grateful. “Funny,” he says; “so can I.”

 

 

 

They never put a name to what they are doing together, and they both prefer it that way. They’re two people on a spaceship trying to make a living. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

Then the dog shows up. Then Faye. Then Ed. Jet doesn’t really mind—the _Bebop_ is a big enough ship to accommodate them, and it’s nice to have others around, really. But what surprises Jet is that for all that Spike bitches about it, he doesn’t do anything to change the situation, either.

Huh, Jet thinks, and decides never to bring this up with Spike, lest in his defensiveness Spike does something that he will regret. Like leave the _Bebop_.

(A third thing: Jet has never admitted this, and does not know how to, but this somehow has become the only thing that matters. The five of them—Jet and Spike and Faye and Ed and even Ein. Without them, Jet finds that nothing makes sense. He doesn’t know how to ask if it is that way for them, as well.)

 

 

 

Spike’s long legs are hooked over Jet’s shoulders as Jet moves slowly within him, his head bowed. Jet can feel sweat gathering on his arms, at his temples. Spike, for his part, is looking up past Jet towards the ceiling and lying there rather silently, which is unusual for him but not necessarily worrying. Jet holds Spike’s hips, angling him upwards so that he can fuck him better, and Spike’s hands are lazily brushing against the back of Jet’s forearms, running up and down from his elbows to his hands. Spike looks kind of blissed out but also a little bit as if he has checked out, which would irritate Jet more if he weren’t so busy focusing on not coming right away. He slows a little, stops, and turns his head so that he can kiss Spike’s knee.

Spike looks at him. “Have you seen that there’s a spot on the ceiling getting mildewy?”

Jet huffs. “That’s what you’re paying attention to right now?”

“Sorry.” Spike wriggles a little underneath him, and Jet grits his teeth. “You know it’s uncomfortable when you stop moving, right?”

Jet moves his hips, a slow circular motion that he knows tends to get Spike worked up. “Yeah?” he says. “And how about when I do this?”

Spike closes his eyes and hisses a breath through his teeth. “Again.”

Jet complies all too willingly, and he is gratified when Spike’s fingers on the back of his arms starts to scrabble a little desperately for purchase.

“Maybe—” Spike starts to say; Jet twitches his hips, and Spike gasps a bit “—maybe that feels a little better.”

Jet can’t help but laugh. “Okay,” he says, leaning down to kiss Spike. Now he has Spike practically pinned beneath him, Spike’s legs drawn up nearly to his shoulders. Jet knows that this can’t be comfortable for long, so he intends to make the most of this moment while he can. “And what about when I do this?” With his right arm, he reaches between their bodies and wraps his hand around Spike’s cock.

Spike groans. “Uh huh,” is all he finally manages to say, and Jet just smiles and kisses him again, slowly fucking and jerking Spike off in tandem. Spike wraps his arms around Jet’s shoulders and holds on. Despite this Jet still comes first, and he shudders through it, Spike’s hands rubbing his shoulders and Spike whispering something that Jet can’t quite hear. Then it has passed, and Jet pulls out of Spike carefully, pulls off the used condom. Spike is smirking at him, and he slowly lowers his legs from where he has been nearly folded in two all this time.

“Finally,” Spike says. “I thought you were gonna break me in half for a minute there.”

Jet scowls at him. “You’re the one who was lying there on your back not moving for the first half of it.”

“Oh, like you do every time I’m on top?” Spike’s smile is mischievous, and he has started jerking himself off since Jet finished fucking him. “Are you going to blow me now or what, man?”

Jet leans down and kisses him again. “Infuriating,” he says against Spike’s mouth, then he sits back and bats Spike’s hand away, wrapping his own around Spike’s cock again. “Is that what you want?”

“I’m sure that I just asked for it.”

Jet squeezes his hand and twists a little. “Maybe you should have asked more nicely.”

Spike laughs, but his tone is breathy, high-pitched. “Make me,” he says, and so Jet does: jerking Spike off with his right hand, fingering him with his left, kissing the insides of Spike’s thighs until he has Spike begging for it, begging Jet to put his mouth on him, and, well—it is only so long that Jet can resist, and Spike does throw a ‘please’ or two in there. Spike throws his head back and cries out when Jet licks up his dick and then he comes only a few minutes later, one of his hands twisting in the bed sheets, the other gripping at Jet’s shoulder so hard that Jet can see the whites of Spike’s knuckles when he turns his head.

Afterwards Jet lies on the bed next to Spike, who is still shaking a little, in tremulous bursts that slowly subside as Jet rubs his hand over Spike’s stomach. Finally Spike grabs Jet’s hand and brings it to his mouth and kisses his palm. “Asshole.”

Jet laughs. “Maybe,” he says. He smoothes his hand through Spike’s damp hair, which is trying to cling to his forehead and mostly failing because there is just so much of it. “What about you, all ‘you gonna blow me or what’? Rather rude.”

“I dunno,” Spike says. “I thought it was funny.” He smiles up at Jet, who is still combing his fingers through Spike’s hair as he looks down at him, propped up on his prosthetic elbow.

Spike wriggles his eyebrows. “Missing what you once had?” he asks, meaning the hair.

Jet sighs and leans down and kisses him. “Nah,” he says, meaning everything else. “Just thinking about what I have now.”

Spike—forever unused to genuine affection—blushes. He hides it by turning his face from Jet’s, but Jet can see the small smile at the corners of Spike’s mouth. He leans down and kisses it, and Spike puts his arms around him and kisses him back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

4.  
Spike doesn’t like kids. He doesn’t like dogs, he doesn’t like women with attitudes, and he doesn’t like relationships, either. He especially doesn’t like relationships with bossy know-it-alls who are always trying to tell Spike what they think is best for him. Not that he and Jet have ever called what they’re doing a relationship—and, God willing, they never fucking will. All of this is _true,_ damn it—but none of it explains why, with Jet gone these past three days on a supply run and a bit of R &R, Spike feels so fucking _bored_. There’s only so many times that he can play chess with Ed and lose, after all, before he gets sick of that too.

Faye is on her way back from a solo bounty mission—which wasn’t successful, of course, none of them ever are these days—when she enters the living room where Spike is lying on the couch with his feet up on the back of it. He is trying to fall asleep and, for once, unable to, which is another thing that he hates, another feeling that concerns him more than it should, because it always means that—well, it always means that something is wrong. That’s what that means. And it doesn’t happen often. But he cannot figure out what the hell it means this time.

Faye has her red jacket slung over her shoulder, and she looks down at Spike, one hand on her hips. “Did you even think about doing any work today?”

“Nope.”

“Tsk. You know, you’re more dead weight than the dog is.”

“Am I? Because you tried to do some work and failed, so doesn’t that make us even in the end?”

“I _tried,”_ Faye says loftily. “Which makes me better than you, and you know it. What’s for dinner?”

Spike shrugs.

Faye frowns. “Jet is still gone?” She tosses her jacket on the opposite couch and briefly goes to look in the kitchen. Spike can hear her moving things around and opening all of the mostly-empty cabinets. After a few minutes she returns with a few packages of instant noodles. “Did Ed eat?”

“Dunno,” Spike says. He watches her set the noodles down and go to the corridor to call for Ed. “Aren’t you feeling motherly today.”

“Fuck off,” Faye says, but Spike knows that he has hit a nerve—not a bad one, and not right on the mark, because Faye isn’t motherly at all. But she does have a soft spot for Ed a mile wide, a soft spot that she would rather die than ever admit to. Which is why, of course, Spike has to poke at it every chance that he gets.

“Ed! Ed!” Faye shouts into the ship, and her voice echoes throughout it. “Dumb kid,” she says when she sits down across the table from Spike, and Spike decides to let her hold onto a bit of her pride for now and say nothing. He sits up and reaches for one of the noodle cups. As he does so, Faye snorts a startled laugh.

“What?” Spike asks.

Faye has covered her mouth with one of her hands. She lowers it, still smiling, and points at Spike’s collarbone, which the unbuttoned top of his shirt has revealed. Spike had forgotten about the mark left there by Jet’s teeth, still starkly visible even several days after being left. He flushes a little bit.

“The black dog that won’t let go once he bites, huh?” Faye says. Her eyes are bright with laughter, her hand at her mouth again to hide her wide smile.

“Fuck off,” Spike grumps, pulling the tab on the noodles and cooking them instantly. As he says it, Ed bounds into the room with Ein on their heels, shouts, “Faye-Faye!” and clambers over the back of the couch to sit next to her.

“Hey, careful!” Faye says. “You’re gonna make me spill my noodles.” But she is still smiling, and Spike sees it, and Ed just laughs and tells the two of them about the latest new hacking program they’ve designed. And for all that it sucks that Jet isn’t there—because it does, damn it, and Spike is feeling petulant enough to admit it—there is something wonderful about this, too. Something that Spike, completely taken by surprise, finds that he hasn’t even fully noticed until now.

“Tell us what’s got you all grumpy, Spike,” Faye says when Ed finishes their story and is wolfing down their noodles. Ed nods at this and looks up at Spike, apparently keenly interested, as they are in nearly everything, really, and Spike sighs.

“Wait till you hear,” Spike says, feeling a little melodramatic and woe-is-me. “Jet tells me he’s going to Mars for a while. And I’m like, fine! Go to Mars, I don’t care. Because I don’t,” he adds pointedly before Faye can say anything smart about it and Spike has to remind her that she is currently letting Ed hang off her shoulder. “But now I’m just like, where’s Jet? You know?”

Faye gives him a pitying look. “You are so pathetic,” she says, and slurps up the last of her noodles.

Spike scowls at her. “You asked,” he points out.

“Yeah,” she says, “before I knew your story was gonna be so pathetic.”

Spike resists the urge to hurl his noodles at her. Ed has finished their food and is holding the noodle container upside down, as if doing so they will magically discover that more food has actually been hiding in it this whole time.

“I miss Jet too,” Ed says when they have figured out that there is no more food coming. “What’s taking him so long?” They toss the empty container backwards across the room and look, for one of the only times that Spike can ever remember seeing, a little put out. “Does he need me to water his bonsai again?”

Spike’s chest tightens a little, with unreasonable fear. “No, but I’m sure he won’t mind if you do.”

“Bonsai!” Ed shouts, and practically cartwheels down the hallway towards the room where Jet keeps his plants.

Faye is looking at Spike, sharply, and Spike doesn’t much like the look on her face. “What?” he says aggressively, picking up his empty container and chucking it in the bin.

“You know he’s fine, right?” she says. “He just wanted space for a couple of days. No big deal.”

“Who said it was a big deal?”

Faye shakes her head. “I don’t get you two. You talk a big game, Spiegel, but at the end of the day I always see you coming home to him. Now what is that about?”

“Faye,” Spike says, very seriously, “if you keep talking to me about this, I am absolutely going to throw you out of the fucking airlock.”

Faye picks up her jacket and heads to her quarters, laughing so hard that it echoes down the hall behind her even when she is gone. Spike presses his thumbs to his temples for a moment, then gets up and follows Ein to see whether Ed has flooded the place yet.

Surprisingly, they haven’t, and for once they are using the small watering can rather than the hose. Ed studiously waters each small pot, careful not to disrupt any of the tiny plants or overwater them.

Spike slouches in the doorway and watches them at it. “Jet has been teaching you how to do this, huh?”

Ed nods vigorously. “Bonsai,” they say, and they sound serious about it, “are very important.”

“Yeah?” Spike says, amused. “And why is that?”

Ed finishes watering the last plant and leans back on their heels, proud of their work. “Because,” they say, “they matter to Jet-person.”

Spike blinks, feeling oddly unseated. “That is true.” He thinks of the countless hours Jet has spent in here fastidiously pruning his beloved bonsai, sometimes to the point of overpruning until Faye inevitably comes in and drags him out on the pretense of making Jet cook them all dinner. It is amazing, really, how the absence of Jet’s presence can change things around here—how the absence of any of them upsets a sort of fragile balance that can exist only here, on this ship.

Ed looks up at Spike. Their bright orange hair is wild, but clean and not tangled—so Faye has been reminding Ed to shower and brush, too. Spike almost smiles.

Ed says, “You’re important to Jet-person, too.”

Spike doesn’t know what to say: feels that feeling in his chest again, and the sense, faraway but unshakeable, that something is wrong. He nods.

“And so am I,” Ed says, and beams. “And Faye-Faye, and Ein.”

Spike doesn’t know why this bowls him over the way that it does, how hearing Ed say this like it’s so simple, like it _means_ something, catches him utterly off guard. “Yeah,” Spike says at last. “Jet is a big ol’ softie like that.”

“Softie! Yes. He is the black dog,” Ed says, and mimes biting down hard on something, “that doesn’t let go.” They look up at Spike and smile. “What about Spike-person?”

“What about me?”

“Are we important to Spike-person too?”

Fuck. Spike stares down at Ed, at a loss for words. He can’t fucking _lie_ to the kid, he’s not a monster, but admitting anything is about as painful and as laborious as pulling fucking teeth. God, he wishes Jet were here.

“Uhh,” Spike says, and Ed inches over and wraps their arms around his leg. “Listen, kid. Don’t tell anyone I said this, yeah?”

“Secret!”

“Yeah,” Spike says, reaching down to ruffle Ed’s hair. “Secret. You’re important to me, too.” It feels like something he should have said with Jet around. He doesn’t know why.

“Yay!”

“Now go bugger off and bother Faye or something,” Spike says. “I’m sure she misses you.”

“Faye-Faye!” Ed exclaims, and clambers out of the room. Ein follows on their heels. Spike watches them go, and then it is just him and the bonsai trees and the thoughts in his head all saying, over and over again, that he better not get comfortable—because if memory is a liar, and he knows that it is, then hope is its more dangerous cousin, and it will gut you before you even get the chance to look ahead.

Spike wanders back into the living room and sits on the couch. Overhead, the fan wobbles on its axis. He waits.

When Jet finally returns later that night, there is something wrong. Spike knows it immediately, and it pisses him the fuck off. Jet is bleeding from what looks like a knife-wound on his shoulder, and he has his prosthetic hand pressed to it, blood seeping between his fingers, as with his other hand he tries to keep ahold of the supplies he had gone out for in the first place.

“Oh, Spike,” Jet says when he sees him, and then he doesn’t say anything, as if he knows that anything he says right now will just make it worse.

“What,” Spike says, crossing the room towards Jet and yanking the bags from him rather forcefully, which makes Jet wince, “the _fuck,_ Jet? All those times you tell me not to do stupid shit—”

“And yet you keep doing it,” Jet interrupts. “I didn’t do anything, Spike. Some guy tried to mug me on my way home. Can you just get out of my way so I can sew myself up?”

Spike backs off, uncertain what the hell to do with a bleeding Jet whom he hasn’t seen in days and has, apparently, missed really damn badly. Jet heads down the hallway to where he keeps the medical supplies, picks through them for a moment looking for what he needs, and then he sits down on a bench in the small room and hands a wad of gauze to Spike.

“Hold that for me, will you?” he asks. Spike takes it wordlessly, sitting down opposite Jet and watching him peel back his jumpsuit, then his undershirt, to get a better look at his injury. It isn’t that bad, objectively; not when you consider the scale of the injuries that the two of them tend to accumulate. But it’s still like—it’s still there, it happened, and now Jet is patching himself up because Spike doesn’t know how to do shit like that, and Spike is just sitting here holding the fucking gauze and watching Jet do it.

Jet finishes putting in the stitches and looks up at Spike. His expression shifts. “Are you all right?”

Spike throws the gauze at him. “You’re the one with the stab wound,” he says, “for Christ’s sake.”

Jet fumbles the gauze, gets a hold of it, and lets his gaze linger on Spike for a moment. But he doesn’t say anything else, and he applies the bandages to himself while Spike hovers in silence. Then he washes the blood from his hands in the sink until the water stops running pink and runs clear.

Jet dries his hands and looks at Spike. “C’mere.”

Spike, feeling petulant, feeling something way too big inside his chest and head, something fighting to burst out and wreak some sort of havoc, doesn’t move.

Jet sighs and steps in. He takes Spike’s face by the chin, looks at him for a moment, and then kisses him. “Better?”

“No,” Spike grumps. “You were gone for a long fucking time.”

Jet laughs. “It was three days.”

“Yeah, well, ask the others,” Spike says defensively. “That’s too long, man. Shit falls apart around here when you’re not around. That’s just a fact.”

“Oh, yeah? What fell apart?”

“I’m sure there’s something,” Spike says.

Jet hums. “I believe you. You are all incapable of taking care of yourselves, let alone each other.”

“Thank you,” Spike says. “That’s what I have been saying.”

Jet chuckles, a nice warm sound. There are a lot of nice warm things about Jet, such as his embraces, which Spike remembers when Jet draws close and wraps his arms around him. Spike sighs and slouches into it, resting his head on Jet’s shoulder. He knows that he has to say something, but he doesn’t know how.

“There’s something wrong,” he tells Jet quietly. “I don’t know what it is. But it’s—I can feel it.”

Jet runs his hands over Spike’s shoulders. “We’ll figure it out.”

 _We._ “That’s the thing,” Spike says, and he feels so tired; he feels so fucking tired. “I don’t think that we ever will.”

Jet doesn’t say anything. And Spike knows, in that moment, that there are things Jet is afraid of that he has never put words to, things that Spike is pretty sure are going to happen whether either of them likes it or not.

“Damn it,” he says. He melts a little more against Jet so that Jet is supporting most of his weight. “You smell good.”

“And you smell like sweat and cigarettes,” Jet says. “C’mon. Let’s go to bed.” So they do.

 

 

 

Spike, back on the couch. Jet is unwinding some of the bandages that cover most of Spike’s body, carefully unwrapping the ones around Spike's hands and arms, then the ones from his legs. Spike stares up at the ceiling, placidly smoking a cigarette.

“So?” he asks after a while. “How do I look, doc?”

“Like shit,” Jet says. “But slightly better shit, I guess. I want to leave these ones on a little bit longer.” He taps the bandages on Spike’s abdomen. “But you should be able to get around okay now. Wanna try?”

“Dunno.” Spike flicks the cigarette butt away. He is exhausted. He feels like he has been exhausted for years and years, and maybe he has. He closes his eyes and tries not to think about Vicious, about Julia, about stupid fucking crime syndicates and the goddamn idiots who get caught up in them as teenagers. He can’t remember where Faye or Ed are, or the stupid dog either. He thought he heard them before, but now he can’t remember. Like shifting your thumb and changing the line of parallax.

“Okay.” Jet leans back and lights a cigarette of his own, holding it with the fingers of his prosthetic arm. He likes to do that until the cigarette burns down to the filter, because he can’t feel it.

Spike watches him. He can’t remember the last time they took on a bounty hunting job. “I lost my eye, and you lost your arm,” he says. “I wonder what that says about us.”

Jet takes a drag of the cigarette and holds his breath. “That we’re careless?”

Spike sits up, ignoring the pain in his abdomen, and kisses Jet. It takes Jet by surprise and he exhales the cigarette smoke into Spike’s mouth, but that’s what Spike wanted in the first place. Spike closes his eyes and leans back and blows the smoke up towards the spinning ceiling fan.

Jet raises an eyebrow at him. “You like that?”

“Yeah,” Spike says. “Do it again.”

Jet shrugs and puts the cigarette to his lips. When he lowers it, Spike kisses him again, kisses the smoke right out of his mouth. As he does so, he lowers his hand to Jet’s crotch and palms him through his pants.

Jet snorts a laugh. “You’re practically in a fucking body cast,” he says. “I am not having sex with you.”

“It’s just the torso,” Spike says. “Come on. I’ll lie there and you can have your wicked way with me.”

Jet shakes his head. “Not interested.”

Spike rubs his hand against Jet’s dick. “I dunno, man, you seem pretty interested to me....”

Jet pushes his hand away. “Not tonight, cowboy.”

Spike grumbles and throws himself back against the couch. “You never let me have any fun.”

Jet laughs and takes another drag of his cigarette. “Maybe so.”

Spike lies there, looking up at the spinning fan. Everything feels so heavy. He feels heavy all over. “I don’t know what to do,” he says at last. It feels like an admission of guilt. It feels like a lie.

Jet glances over at him and stubs out the cigarette. “You don’t have to do anything,” he says. “It’s over now.”

Spike just shakes his head. “No,” he says; “it’s not.”

 

 

* * *

 

  

5.  
A little while after the last of the bandages come off, Spike and Jet come limping back to the _Bebop_ after a failed bounty gig. Somewhere along the way someone tried to push Jet into a river and nearly succeeded before Spike managed to intervene. All in all it has just been a disappointing day in general, and kind of a frustrating one, and all Jet is really feeling up to at the moment is having a good long fuck. Luckily, Spike seems to be of the same mind, because as soon as they get onto the _Bebop_ he pushes Jet down the hallway towards his room and kicks the door shut behind them.

Jet, eager to get it on with, starts fumbling with the buttons of Spike’s shirt. “Why,” he says, making quick work of the buttons, “don’t you ever take me anywhere nice?”

“You don’t like nice places,” Spike sniffs, which is true enough. “Or nice men.” He eyes Jet.

Jet softens, and he slows with Spike’s shirt buttons. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he says, and he leans in and kisses Spike, real slow and deep.

“Please,” Spike says when Jet finishes kissing him. “There is nothing nice about me.”

Jet has Spike’s shirt open now, and he slides his hands underneath it, running them over Spike’s bare skin so that he shivers. “Oh yeah?” Jet says. “That’s too bad. Because nice men get to fuck me tonight.”

Spike reels him in by his hips, pulling Jet between his legs and kissing him. “You are unbearable,” he says, “I can’t stand you,” but Jet can feel him smiling.

They’ve had a lot of practice at this, and Jet doesn’t need a lot of warm up, even though it is nice to feel Spike’s fingers inside of him; but he knows what he wants tonight, and that’s to be fucked until he can’t fucking think anymore about what a shit day it has been. “Come on,” he says to Spike, “I’m ready, hurry up.”

“All right, all right.” Spike places a kiss on Jet’s shoulder, then his chest. “Someone’s in a rush. How do you want to be?”

Jet considers. “My knees.”

“Ooh,” Spike says. He reaches behind Jet and grabs his ass. “What’s gotten into you tonight?”

“I know what I’d _like_ to be in me,” Jet says. Spike bursts out laughing and leans in to kiss Jet again.

“Fucking unbearable,” he says, kissing Jet messily, kissing all over his face, pausing at the end to lick the strip of metal that holds Jet’s long since split and messily re-fused cheekbone together. “Go on, then.”

Jet turns over, and Spike puts his long fingers inside him again, just briefly, then scissors them so that he holds Jet open and slides inside him. “Good?”

“Yeah,” Jet says, and sighs. “Real good.”

“Okay.” Spike leans down to plant a kiss on Jet’s back, and then he starts to fuck him. Spike is an incredible fuck when he is focused and determined about it, which tonight he is. He fucks Jet until Jet’s knees are sore, and Jet has to brace himself against the frame of the bed to keep himself upright, and then he fucks him some more.

Eventually Jet can feel Spike tiring, and he too is beginning to feel the strain of this current position. “Switch,” he says to Spike when he has the breath to, and Spike nods, sweaty and bright-eyed and blinking at him a little owlishly, like he is not all there right now. They shift positions so that Jet is on his back and Jet puts his hands on either side of Spike’s face and kisses him. Spike sighs and melts against him.

“You feel good,” he says softly. “You feel really fucking good.”

“Wow, thanks,” Jet says wryly. “Always knew that I was a good fuck, but it’s nice to have some validation.”

Spike shakes his head. “Not what I meant,” he murmurs, his hands running over Jet’s hipbones, the insides of his thighs.

Jet shivers. He knows better than to press Spike for specifics when he is like this—knows that what Spike has already said is precious despite how little was actually said. “Come on,” Jet says bracingly. “Don’t fall asleep on me yet,” and Spike perks up and kisses him. The two of them start fucking again, but it is different now: slower, gentler, the kind of sex that Jet might call with anyone else not _fucking,_ but making love.

He will never say that aloud. But he wonders, when he reaches up to touch Spike’s face and Spike turns his head and kisses his palm, whether Spike isn’t already thinking it too.

 

 

 

They lie in bed together, naked, sharing a cigarette. The sheets are tangled around their legs and they are both exhausted, but it is a warm feeling, not the painful exhaustion that follows them everywhere else that they go.

“It’s a real madhouse that we’ve got ourselves here, Jet,” Spike says. “You know, I really don’t think those other two are ever gonna leave us alone. And the mutt? Forget it.” He passes the cigarette to Jet.

“I reckon you’re right,” Jet says. He looks over at Spike, who is staring steadfastly up at the ceiling, his hands behind his head. “And?”

“And?”

Jet doesn’t know how to ask or even what to say. Are you going to run? he wants to ask. He could ask that of Faye, too. The two of them, Spike and Faye, always running, running, running. Jet wonders whether they even know that they’ve got somewhere now where they don’t need to do that anymore. Whether the presence of such a place even matters when running has so long been part of your soul.

Are you going to stay? Jet could ask that too, but it feels stupid, reductive. It’s not the question he’s looking for and he knows it. If he asks that he will be taking the easy way out, and he’s been trying for years now to train himself out of doing that, no matter how hard it is.

Are you afraid? That’s closer to the heart of things, the real issue that stands there among all of them all the time no matter what they do. Fear of beginnings, of endings, fear of being stuck in the middle and never being able to understand how the hell you got there. Fear of memory, because the context doesn’t help. Fear of hope, because coincidence doesn’t make sense in the way that fate does, and so in the end it will do nothing but leave you asking questions of the absurd.

In the end Jet doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t have to. He hands the cigarette back to Spike and watches him put it to his lips. It flares at the filter, and when Spike is done with it he puts it out on the ashtray by Jet’s bed. By their bed.

“You know,” Spike says softly, “all this time I’ve been looking for an ending. I’ve just been looking for something to make everything else make sense. I thought an ending would do that.”

Jet knows. He pushes his hand through Spike’s hair, and Spike turns his head to look at him. “But endings haven’t really treated me that well so far,” Spike says, and Jet knows what he is thinking about: about Julia, about Vicious, about Gren and Lin and all the others, everyone who has ever gotten hurt. “Maybe it’s time I stopped chasing them so hard.”

Jet doesn’t know what to say to that. “Maybe.”

Spike smiles and rubs his thumb over Jet’s bottom lip. “You know what’s fucked up? I almost didn’t come back this time.”

Jet’s mouth goes dry. “Yeah,” he says, raspily. “I know.”

“I’m glad, though,” Spike says. His eyes are searching Jet’s, intense and clear-gazed, and Jet can see the difference in shade between the two of them, the lightness of the right and the darkness of the left. “I’m glad that I came back. Do you believe me?”

Jet, looking into Spike’s eyes like that, can’t do anything but. “Of course I believe you,” he says, and Spike smiles, a smile that reaches his eyes. Jet wonders if that means that smile can finally reach the things that Spike says he sees with that synthetic eye: the untouchable past and all the grief that lies within it. The past that governs Spike’s life and Jet’s life and the past governing Faye’s life and Ed’s life and even Ein’s life. They have all been trying to escape it, and it is only now, really, on the deck of the _Bebop_ looking back, do they realize that maybe they finally have.

“What are you thinking?” Spike asks.

“I’m thinking,” Jet says, slowly, “that you should kiss me.”

Spike smiles. “All right, big guy,” he says, that smile still in both of his eyes, and he leans in to do as promised.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
